‘The Bank must to use its power to create money to help, rather than hinder, the green transition.’
Photograph: David Levenson/Alamy

As the adage goes: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” After decades of climate complacency, for those in the environmental movement it certainly feels like we might be living in those weeks.

Direct action by striking students and Extinction Rebellion has propelled the climate emergency to the top of the news and the political agenda. But while protesters have – quite rightly – called on the government to take more responsibility, the City of London has largely escaped the firing line.

In the three years since the Paris climate agreement, as the government has spoken (often empty words) about doing its part in lowering emissions, our financial sector has been pouring hundreds of billions of pounds into fossil-fuel projects, unleashing environmental havoc across the planet.

Positive Money and Fossil Free London will be demonstrating outside the Bank on Thursday

In its role as the regulator of the financial system, the Bank of England has the power to stamp out irresponsible fossil fuel lending – using the same tools it has used to clamp down on risky mortgage lending since the financial crisis. In choosing not to use these powers, it is complicit in the climate crisis.

The Bank rightly recognises that climate change is a huge risk to financial stability, and it has made encouraging first steps on climate, announcing in April that it will disclose its own climate risk. But with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning that we have only 11 years to avert the devastating impacts of climate change, central banks can, and must, go further.

Alongside being able to shape the behaviour of commercial banks, the Bank also has the resources to mobilise huge amounts of its own capital. Since 2009 it has created £445bn of new money, to buy assets from financial markets, through quantitative easing (QE).

But since 2016, the Bank has introduced corporate QE, buying £10bn worth of bonds from some of the world’s most socially and environmentally irresponsible companies. Nearly half of the bonds listed as eligible for purchase are from companies in high-carbon sectors, including the likes of Shell and BP.

While the Bank has not yet disclosed which bonds it has purchased, even the very act of declaring them eligible has a positive material impact for these fossil companies, by pushing up the prices of their bonds and lowering the yield they have to pay to investors.

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The behaviour of the central bank reverberates throughout the financial system. In signalling to the market that it is willing to invest in fossil fuels, it is setting an example for other banks and investors to do the same. The Bank is legitimising climate criminals.

With speculation mounting that more QE will be rolled out in response to a Brexit shock or a coming recession, Positive Money and Fossil Free London will be demonstrating outside the Bank on Thursday as it releases the latest inflation report. They are calling on the Bank to use its power to create money to help, rather than hinder, the green transition – by committing to “green QE”.

We are demanding that the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee at the very least blacklists bonds from fossil fuel companies, and instead considers kickstarting a Green New Deal by buying assets in low-carbon sectors, such as renewable energy.

Ed Miliband and Caroline Lucas have called on the UK to be on a “war footing” to fight climate change. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to finance a war – now it’s time for it to help fight the biggest war of my generation.